Confessions of an Oracle Database Junkie - Arup Nanda
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone. They may not necessarily reflect that of my employers and customers - both past or present. The comments left by the reviewers are theirs alone and may not reflect my opinion whether implied or not. None of the advice is warranted to be free of errors and ommision. Please use at your own risk and after thorough testing in your environment.

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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Feedback on Tanel Poder's AOTS #2 Class

In my earlier post I me wrote about Tanel Poder's Virtual Class #2.Tanel is a world famous expert in Oracle internals. I was fortunate to be able to attend the class on all days except Friday. It was solid 4 hours of learning every day. Let me summarize some of the key points I appreciated as an attendee. I hope it will be useful for you making a decision to attend one later.

(1) The beginning of the class explained the concepts like latching and locking pretty well

(2) Next in the line was understanding "why" they occur; not "how much"

(3) Reinforced the fact that latches smell like, look like, behave like locks; and are kind of locks

(4) Differentiated between soft and hard parses and explained the role of cursor_sharing parameter

(5) Differentiated between library cache pins, locks and latches

But if there is only one benefit I can say is priceless, that would be the holistic tuning, using the key concepts to understand the behavior all the way from the user response time to tracing the unix process to understand where the bottlenecks are. Tanel explained all that with a live example to cement that knowledge. All in all, an excellent class by an excellent instructor.